‘As a writer you see something from the outside, but you also have the view from inside’
Thu, Apr 16, 2015
When award winning English novelist and short story writer Jon McGregor comes to Galway, to read at the Cúirt International Festival of Literature, it will be his second visit to the county in less than a month.
Read more ...'I love bringing a story to life on the cinema screen’
Thu, Apr 09, 2015
Driving home to County Kerry, to help his father with some cattle farming, was not the time Gerard Barrett expected to receive a call from Hollywood A-lister Charlize Theron, asking him to script and direct a film she is producing.
Read more ...‘Cré na Cille is a hymn to the Irish of Connemara’
Thu, Mar 26, 2015
Since its publication in 1949, Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Cré na Cille has been hailed as a masterpiece. Yet the novel has, in the words of John Banville, “remained locked away from non-Irish speakers”.
Read more ...‘My duty is to build bridges’
Wed, Mar 11, 2015
Rarely a week goes by when the strife in Israel/Palestine does not make headlines in the media. In recent years the conflict has seemed ever more intractable, the people increasingly polarised and entrenched. Yet in spite of all, there are still those on both sides of the divide working for mutual understanding and a peaceful resolution of the conflict.
Read more ...‘I Belonged To Glasgow’
Thu, Mar 05, 2015
Some weeks ago Little John Nee captivated the Town Hall studio with his autobiographical show The Galway Years, and he returns to the venue next weekend with more engrossing memoirs in The Glasgow Years in which he will revisit his 1960s childhood.
Read more ...‘There are many ways to connect - for me music is the one’
Thu, Feb 26, 2015
ANDRES MARTORELL is a man on the move. Sunday night found the singer in Carna, where he was taking part in a traditional singers circle. The following morning comes this interview. An hour later he is en route to Dublin to catch a flight to Denmark.
Read more ...‘Life led me away from writing another novel until now’
Thu, Feb 19, 2015
Percy Bysse Shelley once famously declared that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”. While he may have been boosting his own profession with the remark, history furnishes quite a few examples of authors who were actual legislators.
Read more ...‘I’m proud to have Connemara blood in me’
Thu, Feb 12, 2015
FOR SOME 25 years, Gary Lydon has been among the most stalwart of Irish actors with a string of acclaimed performances on stage, television, and film. His credits include leading roles in Billy Roche’s Wexford Trilogy, TV series The Clinic - for which he won two IFTAs - and the films Calvary, Small Engine Repair, and Michael Collins.
Read more ...‘I have no regrets and it’s not over yet’
Thu, Jan 29, 2015
MARY BLACK describes Galway as “a particular favourite place of mine”, but it is no idle platitude. It was here, and more specifically during her tenure with De Dannan, where she came of age as both singer and performer, setting her on the path to her now unassailable position as Ireland’s leading contemporary folk artist.
Read more ...The Pub Landlord - twenty years of ‘behaving appallingly humbly’
Thu, Jan 22, 2015
IT WAS 20 years ago this year that Al Murray introduced the world to the Pub Landlord, his pompously loveable, slightly jingoistic, opinionated font of ‘common sense’, who espouses a ‘Thank God I’m an Englishman’ view of the world, and is hopelessly in love with being British!
Read more ...‘I saved myself from being bullied with the plays I wrote’
Thu, Jan 15, 2015
GALWAY HAS been enriched with many artistic immigrants down the years and among their number is Swedish playwright and translator Ann Henning Jocelyn.
Read more ...‘People should stay rather than emigrate, it’s too convenient for the Establishment for them to go away’
Thu, Dec 18, 2014
In these times of ongoing austerity, looming water charges, and general disaffection, God knows we could all do with a laugh. Let us raise our glasses therefore, in thanks and salutation, to writer Eamonn Kelly who delivers guffaws a-plenty in The Franz Kafka Centre for the Uninvolved, newly e-published and ready for download to a Kindle near you.
Read more ...‘I wanted something like an Irish version of Dante’s Inferno’
Thu, Dec 11, 2014
Dark and audacious, Fisherman’s Blues, the rambunctious new novel from playwright, novelist, and screenwriter Mick Donnellan covers a myriad of genres from crime noir to comedy with an odd bit of religion for good measure.
Read more ...‘Galway has something between a tolerance and an appetite for experiment’
Thu, Dec 04, 2014
December will be a hectic month for Tommy Tiernan as he undertakes a seven date tour across all corners of County Galway, performing his new show Out Of The Whirlwind. The show, he says, will be a mixture of “storytelling and improv”, but this is also likely to be the last run of ‘world tour of Galway’ styled shows Tommy will do.
Read more ...‘I borrow from my surroundings, create fantasy landscapes from my head’
Thu, Nov 27, 2014
He grew up loving outdoor pursuits and the natural world, despite living close to the world’s largest car manufacturing plant. He has lived in Ireland most his life, but his interest in the country was stimulated in part through British Army radio.
Read more ...‘Being an outsider gives me a different view on things other people might take for granted’
Thu, Nov 13, 2014
There is a horse farm about a mile and a half outside Motala, a small town located between Stockholm and Gothenburg in southern Sweden. There it is surrounded by vast woodlands, a huge lake, hunters cabins, and amid the rural isolation, an old mental asylum.
Read more ...Roll over Rick Stein and tell Nigella the news
Thu, Nov 06, 2014
‘Quenelles of Goldfish’, ‘Piglet Brains and Barley Wine’, ‘Chilli-Chocolate Songbird Hearts’, ‘Fag-Ash & Seaweed Anti-Cupcake’; these might sound like ingredients from a Monty Python sketch but in fact they are all from menus dreamt up by the fiendishly fertile imaginations of The Domestic Godless, an absurdist gastronomic art collective from Cork.
Read more ...Paul Heaton - ‘My audience is used to me being a grumbleweed’
Thu, Oct 16, 2014
AFTER 19 highly successful years, The Beautiful South called it a day in 2007 humorously citing “musical similarities” as the reason for the split. It marked the close of the second chapter of band leader Paul Heaton’s career - his first having been as leader/singer of The Housemartins - opening the way for his ‘third act’, that of solo artist.
Read more ...David Baddiel - ‘I’m very unreligious, but it doesn’t stop me being Jewish’
Thu, Oct 09, 2014
David Baddiel has been one of the major names in British comedy over the past near quarter of a century, even if, for most of that time he has been a writer rather than a stand-up, but his new show Fame, Not The Musical, is finally bring him face-to-face with audiences again.
Read more ...Judah Friedlander - ‘I kept hearing people talk about Galway. I thought ‘I gotta go there’
Thu, Oct 02, 2014
On the comedy stage, Judah Friedlander is The World Champion. He is the best athlete in the world, greatest martial artist, the sexual dream of every woman, and a role model to children.
Read more ...